VISITORS ON THE WAY!!

Such beautiful weather. The birds are singing outside (actually the birds are corellas and considered pests but they sound much prettier than traffic noise would in the city), the sky is a deep blue, the sun is shining, the house is (phew) reasonably tidy.

Oh, and the beer fridge is overflowing.

It's going to be a fun weekend. We're going out to see Mt Hope and maybe show the visitors the full Murray. It really is mighty when it's like this. And I'm cranking up the outside wood pizza oven too. Very good news.

Hooray!!

Proven by science!

Today we proved conclusively that South Australia has the most delicious gingernuts, as voted by 6/9 of our testers. I didn't even know they varied by state until one of the many Queenslanders in the office told me. We designed a mostly-double-blind* testing protocol and ranked them from best to worst.

* It's hard to truly double blind this one when one of our testers is addicted to specially imported Queensland gingernuts..

Here are my tasting notes:

Qld - too soft, but a good level of gingeryness. Not a satisfying crunch. 3/10
NSW - hard. Really hard. Kinda too sweet. 5/10
Vic - Spicy. Not too sweet. Not as crunchy as NSW but still good. 7/10
SA - a good balance of hardness and spicyness. Not overly sweet. 8/10

ky is pronounced 'q' and means yellow belt :-)

Summer

Ella did a proper handstand tonight that went for a full 3 or 4 seconds!!! And she learnt how to do a full 360 flip on the monkey bars.

Man - I'm just astounded at how much of a difference all this sunlight has made - that there's suddenly so much light left after dinner that you just HAVE to go down the back and kick balls around and roll in the grass for a while. I feel like I've been indoors huddled around the fireplace for a million years and suddenly SUMMER!

(ok, spring time. But it's really nice here. You'd love it. You should come and visit.)

trying something just cos someone you like likes to do it

So dancing is a lot of fun, and it seems to be an important part of my life, the way basketball, tennis, climbing, skiing, doing a PhD and being in bands have all been. But when I dance, I dance with people I know from dancing. Only rarely can I dance with a friend, someone I already know. Elisabeth and Linda are two marvellous examples of this. So I was chatting with one of my favourite people in the world the other day, when, completely unprompted, I received the following shiny message:

I'll come dancing with you in melbourne, but you have to understand I do it under sufferance
[me: if you do it, you get massive brownie points!]
you can make me do it but you can't make me enjoy it. ok you can make me enjoy but you can't make me want to enjoy it. ok, you can make me want to enjoy it but i'd find it weird.

Man, I feel so loved! This totally made my day! The only sad part is that I want my other favourite person to say the same thing...

I'M GOING TO THE SNOW TOMORROW!!!!!!

http://www.mtbuller.com.au/Winter/Snow-Report/Snowcams


Spending two nights on Mt Buller with my parents and the kids to do some sight-seeing, snow-creature construction, tobogganing and obviously snowball flinging. I haven't been skiing for about 12 years so I'm hoping to fit in at least a half-day somewhere. I'm so excited.

And then - next week - Anna and Sacha* and Steph and Gustav are coming to visit to do some 4WDing and canoeing and drinking in the spa.

And then - week after - we're taking the kids on their first plane ride up to the Gold Coast to do some theme parking.

And then - week after - we're going to stay at Chris and Lauren's place up in Ipswich to do some sight-seeing and gossiping and drinking.

* excused for reasons of having housewarmings.

Oh my god I'm going to the snow tomorrow I have to pack!

5k to 10k

Hard to believe it was only 4 months ago that I shared my joy at making it to 5k. Today I went out and ran 10k non-stop... well.. probably more like 11, I wasn't measuring it exactly. Got some great tunes from the freeway to 10k and the motion traxx podcasts, and they got me to 10k without too much trouble!

Now that I work in the city, I've joined the army of people who run around the domain/opera house area at lunch. I think most tourists who are out there assume that there's some event on, but it's just like that every day.

Now I feel like I should have registered for the city to surf this weekend - it's only 14km. Oh well.